Round the Moon

Chapter XVII

Tycho

At six in the evening the projectile passed the south
pole at less than forty miles off, a distance equal to that already
reached at the north pole. The elliptical curve was being rigidly carried
out.

At this moment the travelers once more entered the blessed rays of the
sun. They saw once more those stars which move slowly from east to west.
The radiant orb was saluted by a triple hurrah. With its light it also
sent heat, which soon pierced the metal walls. The glass resumed its
accustomed appearance. The layers of ice melted as if by enchantment; and
immediately, for economy’s sake, the gas was put out, the air apparatus
alone consuming its usual quantity.

“Ah!” said Nicholl, “these rays of heat are good. With what impatience
must the Selenites wait the reappearance of the orb of day.”

“Yes,” replied Michel Ardan, “imbibing as it were the brilliant ether,
light and heat, all life is contained in them.”

At this moment the bottom of the projectile deviated somewhat from the
lunar surface, in order to follow the slightly lengthened elliptical
orbit. From this point, had the earth been at the full, Barbicane and his
companions could have seen it, but immersed in the sun’s irradiation she
was quite invisible. Another spectacle attracted their attention, that of
the southern part of the moon, brought by the glasses to within 450
yards. They did not again leave the scuttles, and noted every detail of
this fantastical continent.

Mounts Doerful and Leibnitz formed two separate groups very near the
south pole. The first group extended from the pole to the eighty-fourth
parallel, on the eastern part of the orb; the second occupied the eastern
border, extending from the 65° of latitude to the pole.

On their capriciously formed ridge appeared dazzling sheets, as mentioned
by Pére Secchi. With more certainty than the illustrious Roman
astronomer, Barbicane was enabled to recognize their nature.

“They are snow,” he exclaimed.

“Snow?” repeated Nicholl.

“Yes, Nicholl, snow; the surface of which is deeply frozen. See how they
reflect the luminous rays. Cooled lava would never give out such intense
reflection. There must then be water, there must be air on the moon. As
little as you please, but the fact can no longer be contested.” No, it
could not be. And if ever Barbicane should see the earth again, his notes
will bear witness to this great fact in his selenographic observations.

These mountains of Doerful and Leibnitz rose in the midst of plains of a
medium extent, which were bounded by an indefinite succession of circles
and annular ramparts. These two chains are the only ones met with in this
region of circles. Comparatively but slightly marked, they throw up here
and there some sharp points, the highest summit of which attains an
altitude of 24,600 feet.

But the projectile was high above all this landscape, and the projections
disappeared in the intense brilliancy of the disc. And to the eyes of the
travelers there reappeared that original aspect of the lunar landscapes,
raw in tone, without gradation of colors, and without degrees of shadow,
roughly black and white, from the want of diffusion of light.

But the sight of this desolate world did not fail to captivate them by
its very strangeness. They were moving over this region as if they had
been borne on the breath of some storm, watching heights defile under
their feet, piercing the cavities with their eyes, going down into the
rifts, climbing the ramparts, sounding these mysterious holes, and
leveling all cracks. But no trace of vegetation, no appearance of cities;
nothing but stratification, beds of lava, overflowings polished like
immense mirrors, reflecting the sun’s rays with overpowering brilliancy.
Nothing belonging to a living world—everything to a dead world,
where avalanches, rolling from the summits of the mountains, would
disperse noiselessly at the bottom of the abyss, retaining the motion,
but wanting the sound. In any case it was the image of death, without its
being possible even to say that life had ever existed there.

Michel Ardan, however, thought he recognized a heap of ruins, to which he
drew Barbicane’s attention. It was about the 80th parallel, in 30°
longitude. This heap of stones, rather regularly placed, represented a
vast fortress, overlooking a long rift, which in former days had served
as a bed to the rivers of prehistorical times. Not far from that, rose to
a height of 17,400 feet the annular mountain of Short, equal to the
Asiatic Caucasus. Michel Ardan, with his accustomed ardor, maintained
“the evidences” of his fortress. Beneath it he discerned the dismantled
ramparts of a town; here the still intact arch of a portico, there two or
three columns lying under their base; farther on, a succession of arches
which must have supported the conduit of an aqueduct; in another part the
sunken pillars of a gigantic bridge, run into the thickest parts of the
rift. He distinguished all this, but with so much imagination in his
glance, and through glasses so fantastical, that we must mistrust his
observation. But who could affirm, who would dare to say, that the
amiable fellow did not really see that which his two companions would not
see?

Moments were too precious to be sacrificed in idle discussion. The
selenite city, whether imaginary or not, had already disappeared afar
off. The distance of the projectile from the lunar disc was on the
increase, and the details of the soil were being lost in a confused
jumble. The reliefs, the circles, the craters, and the plains alone
remained, and still showed their boundary lines distinctly. At this
moment, to the left, lay extended one of the finest circles of lunar
orography, one of the curiosities of this continent. It was Newton, which
Barbicane recognized without trouble, by referring to the Mappa
Selenographica.

Newton is situated in exactly 77° south latitude, and 16° east longitude.
It forms an annular crater, the ramparts of which, rising to a height of
21,300 feet, seemed to be impassable.

Barbicane made his companions observe that the height of this mountain
above the surrounding plain was far from equaling the depth of its
crater. This enormous hole was beyond all measurement, and formed a
gloomy abyss, the bottom of which the sun’s rays could never reach.
There, according to Humboldt, reigns utter darkness, which the light of
the sun and the earth cannot break. Mythologists could well have made it
the mouth of hell.

“Newton,” said Barbicane, “is the most perfect type of these annular
mountains, of which the earth possesses no sample. They prove that the
moon’s formation, by means of cooling, is due to violent causes; for
while, under the pressure of internal fires the reliefs rise to
considerable height, the depths withdraw far below the lunar level.”

“I do not dispute the fact,” replied Michel Ardan.

Some minutes after passing Newton, the projectile directly overlooked the
annular mountains of Moret. It skirted at some distance the summits of
Blancanus, and at about half-past seven in the evening reached the circle
of Clavius.

This circle, one of the most remarkable of the disc, is situated in 58°
south latitude, and 15° east longitude. Its height is estimated at 22,950
feet. The travelers, at a distance of twenty-four miles (reduced to four
by their glasses) could admire this vast crater in its entirety.

“Terrestrial volcanoes,” said Barbicane, “are but mole-hills compared
with those of the moon. Measuring the old craters formed by the first
eruptions of Vesuvius and Etna, we find them little more than three miles
in breadth. In France the circle of Cantal measures six miles across; at
Ceyland the circle of the island is forty miles, which is considered the
largest on the globe. What are these diameters against that of Clavius,
which we overlook at this moment?”

“What is its breadth?” asked Nicholl.

“It is 150 miles,” replied Barbicane. “This circle is certainly the most
important on the moon, but many others measure 150, 100, or 75 miles.”

“Ah! my friends,” exclaimed Michel, “can you picture to yourselves what
this now peaceful orb of night must have been when its craters, filled
with thunderings, vomited at the same time smoke and tongues of flame.
What a wonderful spectacle then, and now what decay! This moon is nothing
more than a thin carcase of fireworks, whose squibs, rockets, serpents,
and suns, after a superb brilliancy, have left but sadly broken cases.
Who can say the cause, the reason, the motive force of these cataclysms?”

Barbicane was not listening to Michel Ardan; he was contemplating these
ramparts of Clavius, formed by large mountains spread over several miles.
At the bottom of the immense cavity burrowed hundreds of small
extinguished craters, riddling the soil like a colander, and overlooked
by a peak 15,000 feet high.

Around the plain appeared desolate. Nothing so arid as these reliefs,
nothing so sad as these ruins of mountains, and (if we may so express
ourselves) these fragments of peaks and mountains which strewed the soil.
The satellite seemed to have burst at this spot.

The projectile was still advancing, and this movement did not subside.
Circles, craters, and uprooted mountains succeeded each other
incessantly. No more plains; no more seas. A never ending Switzerland and
Norway. And lastly, in the canter of this region of crevasses, the most
splendid mountain on the lunar disc, the dazzling Tycho, in which
posterity will ever preserve the name of the illustrious Danish
astronomer.

In observing the full moon in a cloudless sky no one has failed to remark
this brilliant point of the southern hemisphere. Michel Ardan used every
metaphor that his imagination could supply to designate it by. To him
this Tycho was a focus of light, a center of irradiation, a crater
vomiting rays. It was the tire of a brilliant wheel, an asteria
enclosing the disc with its silver tentacles, an enormous eye filled with
flames, a glory carved for Pluto’s head, a star launched by the Creator’s
hand, and crushed against the face of the moon!

Tycho forms such a concentration of light that the inhabitants of the
earth can see it without glasses, though at a distance of 240,000 miles!
Imagine, then, its intensity to the eye of observers placed at a distance
of only fifty miles! Seen through this pure ether, its brilliancy was so
intolerable that Barbicane and his friends were obliged to blacken their
glasses with the gas smoke before they could bear the splendor. Then
silent, scarcely uttering an interjection of admiration, they gazed, they
contemplated. All their feelings, all their impressions, were
concentrated in that look, as under any violent emotion all life is
concentrated at the heart.

Tycho belongs to the system of radiating mountains, like Aristarchus and
Copernicus; but it is of all the most complete and decided, showing
unquestionably the frightful volcanic action to which the formation of
the moon is due. Tycho is situated in 43° south latitude, and 12° east
longitude. Its center is occupied by a crater fifty miles broad. It
assumes a slightly elliptical form, and is surrounded by an enclosure of
annular ramparts, which on the east and west overlook the outer plain
from a height of 15,000 feet. It is a group of Mont Blancs, placed round
one common center and crowned by radiating beams.

What this incomparable mountain really is, with all the projections
converging toward it, and the interior excrescences of its crater,
photography itself could never represent. Indeed, it is during the full
moon that Tycho is seen in all its splendor. Then all shadows disappear,
the foreshortening of perspective disappears, and all proofs become
white—a disagreeable fact: for this strange region would have been
marvelous if reproduced with photographic exactness. It is but a group of
hollows, craters, circles, a network of crests; then, as far as the eye
could see, a whole volcanic network cast upon this encrusted soil. One
can then understand that the bubbles of this central eruption have kept
their first form. Crystallized by cooling, they have stereotyped that
aspect which the moon formerly presented when under the Plutonian forces.

The distance which separated the travelers from the annular summits of
Tycho was not so great but that they could catch the principal details.
Even on the causeway forming the fortifications of Tycho, the mountains
hanging on to the interior and exterior sloping flanks rose in stories
like gigantic terraces. They appeared to be higher by 300 or 400 feet to
the west than to the east. No system of terrestrial encampment could
equal these natural fortifications. A town built at the bottom of this
circular cavity would have been utterly inaccessible.

Inaccessible and wonderfully extended over this soil covered with
picturesque projections! Indeed, nature had not left the bottom of this
crater flat and empty. It possessed its own peculiar orography, a
mountainous system, making it a world in itself. The travelers could
distinguish clearly cones, central hills, remarkable positions of the
soil, naturally placed to receive the chefs-d’oeuvre of Selenite
architecture. There was marked out the place for a temple, here the
ground of a forum, on this spot the plan of a palace, in another the
plateau for a citadel; the whole overlooked by a central mountain of
1,500 feet. A vast circle, in which ancient Rome could have been held in
its entirety ten times over.

“Ah!” exclaimed Michel Ardan, enthusiastic at the sight; “what a grand
town might be constructed within that ring of mountains! A quiet city, a
peaceful refuge, beyond all human misery. How calm and isolated those
misanthropes, those haters of humanity might live there, and all who have
a distaste for social life!”